Mali attack: we must not give these militants what they want

With floors of executive suites, an espresso machine in every room and the best wine cellar in the country, the Radisson Blu Hotel in the Malian capital, Bamako, is the smartest for hundreds of miles in any direction—and that, in the shifting fashions of Islamic terrorism, makes it a prime target. The gunmen who stormed the hotel on Friday, took more than 100 hostages and killed at least 27 people would have had several aims. To curry favour with Mali's poor and marginalized by attacking a seat of privilege and prestige. To take hostage or kill international guests who were staying there. And, after two years in which Islamist gunmen have massacred civilians at a high-end mall in Kenya, a Kenyan university, city centres in northern Nigeria and last week in Paris, to claim their place in a pantheon where conspiracy theory passes for political theory, suicide for strategy and the intent, above all, is to garner as much attention as possible.

Northern Mali has been home to bands of jihadis for more than a decade. Many are veterans of the bloody and brutal civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, which pitched a Muslim government against Islamist radicals, some of whom fled south into the Sahara when the government finally crushed the rebellion in 2002.

The jihadis were far from monolithic, however. There were rival leaders and groups, competing ethnicities including Arab, Tuareg and African and an array of causes stretching from religious and ideological to Tuareg nationalist and purely criminal. Identity and motivation are fluid enough to be often contradictory. The same individual could be an international Islamist, a Tuareg tribalist, a government employee and a smuggler running cocaine brought from South America to West Africa en route to Europe across the Sahara. Such are the diverse ingredients in a bubbling cauldron of militant Islam which on the surface appears to produce a new group every year or so but which, on closer inspection, reveals the same old fighters and leaders in its ranks.

The group that claimed Friday's attack was al-Mourabitoun. It is the product of a recent merger of two other groups, the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in Africa (MUJAO) and a faction of a group called "al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb." Jihadis in all three groups have switched their international allegiance back and forth between al Qaeda and ISIS, according to which of those two is in the ascendancy. Even as they try to kill Westerners, the jihadis rely on them as a source of revenue, in the past kidnapping several dozen for million dollar ransoms and today depending on the European appetite for cocaine.

It's not easy to draw up a clear strategy to counter a militancy that is such a stranger to logic and consistency. Even if such a thing were possible, how can you negotiate with militants who are unclear about what they want?

Better, for the West, to focus on which parts affect it and which it can affect. The choice of a prestige target reflects a strategic rethinking inside militant Islam that was initiated by Osama bin Laden almost 10 years ago. Though bin Laden would never say that 9/11 or the atrocities that followed it in London or Spain or Bali were a mistake, for the last years of his life he consistently urged his followers to dispense with indiscriminate killing, which inevitably killed Muslims as well. Al Qaeda's growing unpopularity, bin Laden wrote, might "lead us to winning several battles while losing the war."

In letters to al Qaeda groups in Africa, bin Laden sketched out a new plan for the jihad. Stop so much killing, he wrote. Stop talk of a global Caliphate and the imposition of medieval laws. Align with popular uprisings. Chief among these: nationalist resistance to invaders, such as Ethiopians in Somalia or Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, and popular rebellion against corrupt and elitist governments, such as in Nigeria or Mali or Syria. The new jihadi call, to kill the rich and powerful, borrows much from militant Marxism and makes a target of both rich countries and poor-country elites.

The indiscriminate nature of this threat makes it unbeatable. There isn't enough power or wealth in the world to protect a randomly selected group of unarmed civilians from angry young men with guns. But it also makes it easier to endure. The chances of being one of the few thousand out of seven billion people caught up in terrorism every year are, literally, one in a million. There are other things far more likely to kill you than terrorism—among them cars and over-eating—yet few are scared of cars or food.

And if the truth is that we have little reason to worry, then maybe we should stop terrifying ourselves. The coverage terrorist attacks attract ensures the terror spreads from the few poor souls it directly effects to the billions that it doesn't. We're doing their job for them. It's a vexed debate in which our desire for truth contradicts our desire to be free from fear. But if the attackers in Bamako or Paris or Nairobi are motivated, at least in part, by a narcissist's need for attention, maybe we should reconsider giving it to them—not least because by giving them the spotlight they want, we're tempting others like them to do the same.

Alex Perry is an author and foreign correspondent who was based in Africa for close to a decade. His latest book is The Rift: A New Africa Breaks Free.